1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an object detection apparatus, an object detection method, an object detection program, and a device control system for moveable apparatus to detect an object ahead of a moveable apparatus based on a plurality of captured images captured by a plurality of image capturing units, and to control devices mounted to the moveable apparatus using a detection result.
2. Background Art
Safety technologies have been developed for automobiles. For example, body structures of automobiles have been developed to protect pedestrians, and drivers/passengers when automobile collisions occur. Recently, technologies that can detect pedestrians and automobiles with a faster processing speed have been developed with the advancement of information processing technologies and image processing technologies. These technologies have been applied to automobiles to automatically activate brakes before collisions to prevent the collisions. The automatic braking requires a correct range finding or distance measurement to passengers and/or automobiles, and the range finding can be performed using millimeter-wave radar, laser radar, and stereo cameras.
To correctly detect positions and sizes of objects such as pedestrians and automobiles in three dimensional space by using stereo cameras, disparity in the horizontal direction is required to be detected correctly, and a block matching method can be used for detecting disparity.
The block matching method can detect disparity at substantially vertical edges or strong texture with high precision, but the block matching method detects disparity at substantially horizontal edges with lower precision, in particular, cannot detect disparity at substantially horizontal edges.
Therefore, it is difficult to detect an object such as an ahead automobile as one object by stereo imaging. Since automobiles have a box-shaped objects composed of vertical lines at the left and right sides and horizontal lines connecting the vertical lines, the block matching method can only detect disparity of the vertical lines at the left and right sides of objects, and thereby one object (one automobile) may be recognized or detected as two objects (two automobiles) running side by side.